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One week to go! Let's celebrate Christmas with some our favourite web design & development resources.

As excited as we've been about Christmas (& Star Wars last night!) we've still managed to find our favourite design & development resources on the web this week.

You won't be getting one of these next Friday (duh!), so make the most of it. Plus, we've got some really cool things this week:

Adam

The Massive, End of Year Freebie Bundle

Photo: Design Cuts

Design Cuts has been a really good resource for me as a designer over the past year. They often offer exclusive bundles are a super reasonable price. Even if you don’t use everything in the bundle, there’s often a few things in there that can really make it worthwhile.

For the end of the year they’ve released a huge bundle of design resources totally free. The offer is only of for the next 17 days from the date of this article, so move quick!

Material Design Logo Generator

Photo: MD Bootstrap

While I wouldn’t slot this resource into the Material Design category entirely, it is a useful tool to create some quick shadowed icons. You can change the background colour, icon (courtesy of FontAwesome) and the sizes.

A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Photo: Google / Disney

The world has had Star Wars mania this week with the release of The Force Awakens. We saw it as a team last night and it was really good. Like, really, really good. Anyway, Google has hidden a little easter egg for you if you search “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Try it for yourself!

Little Snippets

Photo: Little Snippets

If you’re ever looking for some FE inspiration for your latest project, Little Snippets has hundreds of building blocks which you can take and utilise at your leisure. All snippets are hosted on CodePen so you can go in and shuffle some things around, test driving it for yourself!

Lessons Learnt Building A Large App

It’s always interesting reading up on the struggles and triumphs of developers and their projects; and the developers of Hawaii airlines had a mountain to climb when they took on the project.

Everything was built from the ground up; hardware, features, back-end APIs, front end, UX and design, with lessons learnt along the way, but the outcome is one beautiful site which you can see they’re extremely proud of.

Lewis

Koel

Photo: Koel

Every wanted your own audio streaming service? Well now you can. Koel is a nifty web-based personal audio streaming service with a very modern kick to it. The frontend is written in Vue JS and it’s all powered by Laravel. If you’re keeping up with our Foundation 6 blogs, you’ll know flexbox is a real killer CSS feature for modern websites and Koel demonstrates its power over a conventional grid layout.

Slim v3 is Go!

Photo: Slim

We’re huge fans of Slim here at Magnitude. It’s the core of most of our projects because of its robustness, speed and efficiency. And version 3 definitely does not let you down. Built on PHP 5.5, it implements PSR 7 across its request and response objects which means you can extrapolate any PSR-7 implementation, rather than stick with Slim’s (if you didn’t like theirs!).

Slim v3 utilises a new router to its predecessor, FastRoute, which gives routing in Slim a whole new bulk of power. Slim uses Pimple as its dependency injection container, but again, that can be swapped out for your own container. You can find the full documentation for v3 here.

About the Author

With a passion for all things creative, Adam has been designing for over 5 years, meaning he knows Photoshop and Illustrator inside-out. From web design, to pixel art, to painting and logo design, he’s probably had a go at it. He’ll be the one you’ll be speaking to regarding any design related queries. Outside of work, Adam loves fine art, music and all things internet - you’ll always find him on some social network. Oh, and he loves cats!